Nocturnal Admission

Sometimes I wake up from one of these dreams and I am terrified.

My blankets are braided around the motion of my legs and for a moment I am trapped. Unable to move for fear that you are beside me and know everything that just happened. And I have broken you somehow. I have ruined everything. It is a small wave of terror, one that begins at the edges of my vertebrae and creeps, like the chill from the freezer door, over the top of my head and down the other side.

The thing is, I don’t think about doing these things I’ve done in my dreams when I am awake. Even after I’ve done them I am mortified and wondering, as I lay in some other man’s arm, where are you?

Dreams. Images you explore when you don’t mean to. I never mean to think like this. My eyes are always fixed. My eyes don’t ever wander. Why do they wander now?

God made me monogamous. Sometimes I wonder if it’s through these images. In the moment, it feels fitting. The excitement is there, it reminds me of the when you first touched me–but the face is new, the hands slightly rougher and more translucent. And it’s always leading. Scenes of friendship, scenes of resistance. I argue them–But I love someone else. I can’t. I won’t.

I always do. I’m chilled by every failure. I so easily cede any moral code. I want to call out to myself, resume power in my own body. One moment I am seeing your face and how hideous it would be to tell you each word of what will happen next–and then in these words I am there. Performing them. One enormous last breath before I drown everything.

Everything plays out as it would. Some nameless surveyor wakes me and this new spirit up, and I nakedly stumble over an explanation. The exposure is warm, and somehow worse;  for a few still moments I am comfortable in my actions before someone mentions your name and how I will tell you.

I won’t. I decide. I won’t, because I can’t. Because it will kill you. Because you would end. Because there is no leave here, there is only gone.

I will live with this secret forever and choke it back every time you lean in to kiss me and I will feel the guilt of it every time you touch me, not knowing who else has.

Then it happens. After time you have said something intoxicatingly gentle or sweet and it has ripped me wide, and there is nothing available to stop the words. And I pull you in and begin to tell you everything that I have done. The whole time I look at my bare feet. Always bare on some snow white tile. I don’t want to, but when the moment comes where the silence is suffocating, I look up because I have to see your face. I have to see what happens when everything you’ve wanted your whole existence shifts at your own insistence. And I feel the blankets slide against my cheek as I left my chin, and the sensation is so resistless…

I have never seen it. Can only feel the bones ripped out of me, there, in the morning. In these waking moments I feel stained against my bed sheets. Unsure whether I am waking up to a ruined world. There is an argument–it was a dream, it hadn’t happened. Everything is the same. But I still feel lost somehow, drifting between images of myself, so real, as I come off the drug of temptation. Then it seems so vain how I could destroy our lives so easily.

You said once that you never dream. I feel contaminated. I don’t want to touch your arm, strung so benignly across the pillow by my head. I want to scream at you to run, that you shouldn’t sleep besides something so obscene. You shift, unconsciously dragging your immaculate fingers over my hair and I want to believe that maybe instead you could fix–you could clean–

Your mouth is cold and fresh, and you wake up slowly like there is nothing pulling me away.

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